Marika Taylor

Stephen Hawking was a giant in the field of theoretical physics. In addition to the influence he had with scientists around the world, he wrote A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes which sold over 25m copies and became one of the biggest bestselling science books of all time.

And while A Brief History was a sales blockbuster it is also considered to be one of the most unfinished books of all time. Hawking is fairly credited for doing a great job of seeking to make theoretical physics and cosmology more easily understandable for the layperson but of course those fields are massively complex and challenging to explain in the first place.

A student of Stephen Hawking, Marika Taylor, comes to Manchester to help us better understand the great scientist’s work and extraordinary contributions to physics.

A Student of Stephen Hawking

Marika Taylor is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Birmingham. She completed her doctorate on black holes and string theory at Cambridge University under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. Following postdoctoral research in Harvard and Utrecht, she joined the University of Amsterdam in 2004.

In 2012 she moved to the University of Southampton to create a research centre interfacing between mathematics and the physical sciences, and she later became a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Her current research interests range from exploring the frontiers of fundamental physics to using physics led approaches to develop artificial intelligence.